At the January 21 South Carolina Debate (the one that was co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, where Barack Obama is not just a guest, but also a member), Hillary Clinton was asked to weigh in on whether or not her husband deserved Toni Morrison’s praise as “the first black president.” She took that opportunity (and every other one) to tie herself to that day’s celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was an opportunity to redeem her faux pas of daring to suggest that MLK’s activism might have passed for naught if Lyndon Baines Johnson had not driven the Civil Rights Act through Congress. She came up with this nugget:

You have got a son of the South. You’ve got an African-American. You have a woman. What better way to celebrate the legacy of Dr. King than to look at this stage right here tonight? And, you know, I’m reminded of one of my heroes, Frederick Douglass, who had on the masthead of his newspaper in upstate New York, “The North Star,” that right has no sex and truth has no color. And that is really the profound message of Dr. King.

It looks great as a rhetorical turn. She got broad claims of inclusiveness, tied herself every bit as closely to Dr. King’s legacy as Barack Obama can, and demonstrated that she has (gasp) more than one African-American hero. Perhaps she came up with that one off the cuff, but I suspect that her writers are not on strike.

Little comments like this one can be zingers or they can be deathly errors. In the hands of opponents willing to twist each vignette into a dozen embarrassing implications, they provide terrible weapons – ask Obama what happens when you dare suggest that Ronald Reagan and his advisors might have had “ideas.” If he was half as brutal in twisting Clinton’s King remarks as she has been with his Reagan ones, she might have lost every single African-American vote in South Carolina, but it is not clear that this opening (tempting though it must be) would profit Obama, or any Democrat, in the long run.

The deeper and more intriguing complexities of these attempts to tie the candidates to historical icons are rarely acknowledged. Clinton’s rhetorical embrace of Frederick Douglass is as complex and unintentionally illuminating as any.

Although Clinton cited Frederick Douglass to escape any lingering suspicion that she might discount the works of great black leaders, she could have cited him in defense for the earlier claims that some took as detracting from King. In his oration “In Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” Douglass enunciated a remarkably complex portrait of the relationship between social transformation and political power. He did not shrink from calling Lincoln to task for the many ways in which he was a lukewarm and late convert to the ideal of full equality for the blacks in America. But he then proclaimed, in no uncertain terms, that it was Lincoln’s presidency that freed the slaves. After enumerating all of his shortcomings, Douglass proclaimed that Lincoln, the man who combined a practical adherence to the right ideas with the undoubted potency of presidential power, stands “at the head of [our] great movement.”

On the question of the primacy of moral and political leadership, it appears that Douglass might have been willing to give Johnson his due.

However, there is another, more disturbing complexity in the invocation of Douglass – one that has too many eerie echoes in the current debate:

At the end of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass’s long-time friendship and alliance with the leaders of the suffrage movement quickly deteriorated into an ugly argument about who deserved the vote “more.” In her editorials in “The Revolution,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton contrasted the ignorance, lack of education, and lowly employments of the newly freed slaves in her no holds barred efforts to press the case that well-educated white women were far better suited for the vote than black men. In a particularly uncomfortable echo of what some say is the Clintons’ current strategy, Stanton suggested that blacks would prove so incapable of making informed decisions about how to vote that they would simply express racial solidarity, giving votes en bloc to candidates who might in fact be tools of their oppressors. Bill Clinton’s efforts to link Obama’s victory to those of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, thus treating the candidate who is at least a co-frontrunner as little more than a symbolic racial favorite son, suggest that black votes are as unthinking and unthoughtful as Stanton said they would be – 150 years ago.

Douglass, in turn, lashed back at the convention of the Equal Rights Association insisting that the oppressions suffered by African-Americans were far worse than those inflicted upon women. Susan B. Anthony incredibly retorted that Douglass did not know what he was talking about when he spoke of oppression.

I fear it is this little bit of Douglass’s historical drama that we are re-enacting today but with less reason and less excuse.

In the 1860s, two terribly oppressed groups turned against each other in a desperate struggle to see which one would seize something that both clearly needed and completely deserved. It is quite likely that the division of the suffrage movements in the 1860s cost both dearly. Black men inherited a franchise that was soon rendered meaningless by racist mobs who controlled much of the country, and white women waited fifty years during which the respective fears of the two groups became the pretense for the oppression of both by southern white males.

In this incarnation, we have two ambitious, Ivy League-educated leaders trying to claim the mantle of their respective group’s oppression as a superior title to rule. They both risk exploiting real historical injustices for dubious political advantages that may in the end have little impact beyond raising the now slim chances that the Republicans retain the White House in 2008.

Is it more revolutionary to choose a black man or a white woman for a major party’s presidential nominee? It has taken too long to do either, and “first” is less important than “whether.” It looks like we will have one or the other in 2008, if they don’t manage to sabotage each other in their desperate desire to win.

If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama consider Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton as heroes for their lofty ideals, they should both reconsider whether expropriating the worst elements of their tactics is a very good idea.